


would you have me?

by lovealwayskatie



Category: High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (TV)
Genre: F/M, as always emphasis on the ish, song ficish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:55:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25532485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovealwayskatie/pseuds/lovealwayskatie
Summary: It’s in early June, so late on a Tuesday night that it’s practically bled into Wednesday already, when Ricky realizes that he’s in love with Nini. / in which Ricky is seventeen and doesn't know anything except that he misses Nini
Relationships: Ricky Bowen/Nini Salazar-Roberts
Comments: 18
Kudos: 92





	would you have me?

**Author's Note:**

> alternate summary: in which taylor swift dropped a new album so here i am writing about rini at breakneck speed.
> 
> au(ish), song fic(ish), non-linear(ish) fic based around taylor swift’s folklore including "betty" and "cardigan" with hints of a few other songs. basically go stream folklore because it's all i've been listening to and hopefully i captured 1% of its immaculate vibes here. 
> 
> title is from "betty" and i encourage you to play count-the-folklore references. and when i end up writing a rini fic based on every taylor swift album out there, look away please...
> 
> scenes predominately alternate back and forth from past to present throughout with the present moving in chronological order and the past going backwards. i realize that sounds more complicated than it needs to be but uh :D

Ricky’s never been one to get excited for the first day of school—or really, school as a whole concept—but now having dreamt of it all summer long, he wakes up on the first day of senior year with the bright certainty that today’s the day that he’s going to get back together with Nini.

He thinks this when he rolls out of bed and as he shoves a battered notebook into his backpack and while he brushes his teeth, rearranging his features in the bathroom mirror to reflect back the utmost confidence he has in his impending reunion. He tells his dad about it over brown sugar Pop-Tarts and a cup of coffee that he chugs too quickly, and he assures Big Red of the same when he picks him up to carpool to school together.

“She’s going to have auditions for the musical next week, so I want to make sure that we can do something this weekend. I was thinking bowling instead of a movie, because then we can talk, and I know that she’ll want to tell me all about her summer. Did you see that she got the lead in The Music Man at camp?” The words come bubbling out despite himself, and he spares Big Red a glance as he turns into the already full East High parking lot to see his friend half-asleep, his forehead pressed into the glass of the passenger side window.

He remembers the flood of pride he’d felt seeing the picture she’d posted on Instagram as Marian the librarian, a pair of thin-rimmed glasses set on the slope of her nose. He had to Google the show, but after seeing that Marian was a big part with multiple solos and everything, well, he’d wanted to text her right then because he knew how excited she must be and how excited he was for her, but since they were paused and all, it didn’t feel like he could, no matter how much he wanted to.

But not after today. Today, they’ll be officially unpaused, starting over, turning a new leaf to take on senior year together like they’d always intended.

Nini loves the first day of school—fresh pencils, new notebooks with untouched pages, and she even swears that the hallways have a new school smell, crisp with opportunity. He knows that she had her annual FaceTime call with Kourtney last night to pick out her outfit for the first day, and this morning, her moms coaxed her into taking a picture to post on Facebook before she left.

He’s never been excited to go to school, but he’s always excited to see her.

He wonders if Nini will let him kiss her at school. She’s like, the most physically affectionate person that he knows, and last year, she would take any opportunity to hold his hand in the hallways, interlacing their fingers, or lean into him when seated side by side in the cafeteria, pressing her shoulder or knee or thigh into his.

But kissing in the hallways—in an institute for _learning_ , she’d emphasized—was mostly off-limits, not something for her teachers or random other East High students to bear witness to, and at most, she would give him a tiny, fleeting kiss before rushing off to her next class.

The best days, though, were the ones when she’d find him during lunch and drag him out to the parking lot to make out in the backseat of his car—when she climbed into his lap, digging her fingers into his shoulders, and kissed him with enough adoration to make his own heart burst, he was always all too willing to do whatever she wanted. She’d press kisses along his chin and his jaw and his throat, skim the pads of her thumbs along his cheekbones, thread her fingers through his hair and gently tug just to elicit a reaction from him, a pleading _“Nini”_ until eventually she’d pull his face back up to kiss him as if he was the cause for delay. But it never mattered; he’d be all too happy to comply, kissing her slow and sweet, like they had all the time in the world, not exactly twenty-two minutes before they had to go back to class.

Before first period starts, Ricky catches Nini by her locker with Kourtney who’s actually the one to see him first, and she narrows her gaze as he approaches. At the cold stare, he falters in his step, his shoes squeaking on the shiny linoleum floor, since it’s not unlike the one Nini wore when he last saw her. But then he quickly shakes his head and keeps walking. It’s not like he’s trying to date Kourtney.

“Hey,” he says when he reaches her.

A book in hand, Nini glances up from her locker, and he almost swears that he sees a glint of panic in her eyes before she blinks it away.

“Hi,” she returns. She looks over her shoulder at Kourtney, and the other girl gives her a tiny nod of encouragement that Ricky can’t miss. Nini turns back to him. “We should probably talk.”

“Yeah, I was hoping we could,” he agrees, giving her a small smile.

Kourtney moves to leave, placing a hand on Nini’s shoulder as she tells her, “I’ll see you at lunch, Neens,” adding on a muttered, “Stay strong.”

Ricky adjusts his backpack over his shoulder, gripping onto the straps tightly. “How was your summer?”

“Good. Great actually,” she amends herself. “But what I wanted to say is that—”

He can’t help himself, cutting her off, “I want to hear all about it. Would you want to hang out tonight?”

She’s still speaking, their words overlapping until what he said appears to dawn on her, and she pauses. Closes her eyes, shakes her head, and then looks back at him, appearing utterly confused. “Wait. What?”

“You can come over to my house? It’s not like we’re going to have homework or anything after the first day.”

She shakes her head again, and her eyebrows furrow, the crinkle in her forehead that he knows she gets when she’s confused or concentrating too hard or sometimes even when she’s annoyed appears. He wants to reach out and smooth it away with his thumb like he was prone to doing when they would study together and she’d wear the exact same expression when working on a math problem, but he refrains from doing so when she repeats, “Ricky— _what_?”

Her tone has a harsh edge, and he leans on his heels, tilting his head. “What?”  
  


She tilts her head back at him, confusion melting into disbelief. “You kind of dumped me?”

Ricky jerks his head backwards. _Dumped her?_ “What? No, I wouldn’t do that,” he insists, because it’s true; he would never _dump_ Nini, not when he—

Drawing him out of his thoughts, Nini juts out her chin, her next words set in finality. “But that’s exactly what you did.”

He shakes his head, frowning. “It was. . . a _pause_ , not an annihilation.”

It feels like she’s clobbered him over the head with the book that she’s holding except he thinks he would have preferred that to the next words that come out of her mouth. “Ricky, come on,” she sighs, not even sounding angry, just exhausted. “Everyone knows that a ‘pause’ is just a nice way to spare someone’s feelings. You wanted space, and now you have it.”

He continues to shake his head, his body practically doing so of its own accord at this point, because the last thing he wants is space from Nini. In fact, more than anything, he wants to take her hand, lace their fingers together, and pull her close until she can hear how loudly his heart is pounding, how it’s only racing like this because of her, _for_ her.

The bell warning students to get to class reverberates through the hallways, causing those around them to scatter, and Nini trains him with her wide doe eyes—which he has grown accustomed to seeing filled with adoration, like he’d hung the stars in the sky, but now they only shine with pity.

“I have to go to class,” she tells him gently. “Bye, Ricky.”

\---

It’s in early June, so late on a Tuesday night that it’s practically bled into Wednesday already, when Ricky realizes that he’s in love with Nini.

They’ve been dating for ten months but have been friends for even longer, most of his memories since childhood brimming with Nini. Kindergarten when she dubbed him Ricky, _not_ Richard, before passing him the yellow daisy crayon he requested and when returning the crayon that day, he stumbled to get out her name before settling on Nini, a nickname that elicited the brightest smile he’d ever seen. Seven years old with his missing front tooth and her pigtails tied off with ballet pink ribbons, competing to see who could fly higher and higher on the swings at recess. Walking together to school in fifth grade after the leaves had all gone golden, Nini pulling him along when she went out of her way to step on a particularly crunchy-looking leaf. Middle school summers where she’d follow him to the skatepark, sitting on the sidelines with her nose in a book while he’d skate for hours, and afterwards, they’d get ice cream, balancing their melting scoops in waffle cones as they walked home together.

And now, evident by the knots in his stomach, the sickly dread sweeping through his body, the uptick in anxiety he feels now when he’s around her, he thinks that he loves her.

He’s only seventeen—is he supposed to know what it’s like to be in love? He feels like there’s no way he can, not when his own parents, actual adults, have proven to have nothing of the sort figured out.

He goes over to her house the next night as planned, partially to watch her pack before she leaves for her month away at theatre camp in the woods of Utah but mostly to distract her from said packing, and he suggests that they take a temporary pause.

Nini stills, a sweatshirt—his sweatshirt that she’d long ago siphoned for herself—half-folded in her hands and stares at him from her spot on the floor.

“A temporary pause?” she repeats, her voice pricked with confusion, and he knows the look on her face, the one where she thinks that she’s done something wrong despite their long established roles of Ricky being the troublemaker and shit-stirrer with a laissez-faire attitude of the duo and Nini being the good one, making peace and following the rules to the letter.

“Right,” he confirms with a firm, almost enthusiastic nod as if his ability to sell the idea will lead to Nini instantaneously being on board as well. “You’re going to be gone for so long with no service in the woods, and you know, I want to make sure that you have a great time at camp and don’t have to worry about me.”

“Worry about you,” she mumbles to herself, dropping the sweatshirt in her hands not in her suitcase but on the floor in a rumpled heap.

“Right,” he reiterates. “I want you to have a great time.”

“Right,” she echoes. Her eyes flick up to meet his, her gaze adopting a new appearance of stony indifference, and he bites down on his bottom lip at the uncharacteristic lack of warmth in her eyes.

“Right,” he says once more, his brain apparently incapable of digging up anything else. At her silence, it seems like his cue to leave, so he gets up from her desk chair and heads towards his Vans, abandoned by her bedroom door. “So, I’ll see you when you’re back?”

Nini shrugs and focuses on repacking a T-shirt that’s already been meticulously folded. “Sure,” she tells her suitcase.

He lingers in her doorway for a moment longer, shoes in hand, and briefly, he wishes more than anything that she’d look at him one last time, tacking on a “Goodnight, Nini” to buy himself a few extra moments.

But all she does is make a small noise of recognition as she rearranges something in her bag. She doesn’t look up.

\---

His first day of senior year is going terribly, and he hasn’t even gone to first period yet.

He thinks about Nini all through homeroom, the teacher’s reminders about working on college applications and requesting letters of recommendation floating in one ear and out the other. He thinks about her in math class because it’s her least favorite subject, and he thinks about her in history class, too, because what’s the point in learning about the Federalist Papers when the greatest love story in all of human history is dead?

And when he arrives to his English class to discover that Nini’s in this class too, he knows that he’s going to think about her for the next hour as well except now he’ll get to swap his thinking about her for openly staring at her, a nice switch up to keep his suffering on its toes.

He manages to catch her eye briefly when she enters the classroom before she quickly and pointedly looks away, ducking her head down to let her hair shield her face like a curtain. She slides into a seat two rows in front of him beside Seb from the theatre department, and he watches miserably as she angles herself in her desk towards him, offering a smile and a pencil.

His first day of senior year is going terribly with no signs of stopping, and as he drops his forehead to thump against his desk, he knows that the worst part is that he has no one else to blame but himself.

\---

It’s in early June, so late on a Tuesday night that it’s practically bled into Wednesday already, when Nini drags him out to her treehouse, the very treehouse that served as the backdrop for childhood games of pretend—pirates, he requested; princess and the frog, she begged and always won—and summer sleepovers with whispered secrets exchanged only under the strictest promise of best friend secret-keeping, and a safe haven during sudden summer storms.

They squeeze into the entrance of the treehouse together, lined up from shoulder to hip to knee, allowing their legs to dangle over the edge as they peer out in an attempt to catch the few stars in the mostly cloudy sky. Their brutally tough junior year ended the week before so the guarantee of summer stretches in front of Ricky, allowing him to relegate senior year in the distant future for the time being.

As Nini points out one of the faded stars in the sky, Ricky looks to her instead and unable to help himself, presses a feather-light kiss on her bare shoulder. Not sparing him a look, she continues to talk about the star which she thinks is Polaris, famous for being the axis around which the entire northern sky rotates, but he’s pleased to see her cheeks go pink before he kisses her there, too. When he presses a third, fourth, and fifth kiss along the column of her neck, she lets out a small huff, practically whining when she says, “ _Ricky_ , you’re distracting me.”

His mouth falls open in mock offense. “That’s very funny coming from you, the girl who lives to distract _me_.”

He catches her eye roll before she presses her lips against his in a short, chaste kiss, and he knows that she can feel him grinning against her mouth.

Soon, Nini pulls away with a breathless smile of her own, and for a moment that’s so simple, so utterly normal in the grand scheme of the universe, Ricky suddenly feels like he might die, as if his heart has just been squeezed and twisted in an impossibly tight vice grip in his chest. Oh, God.

“Are you happy now?” she teases, but her eyes are bright, betraying any shred of annoyance she’s trying to feign.

All he manages is a stilted sound in the back of his throat as the new overwhelming, downright terrifying realization sinks in, and he’s infinitely grateful that Nini’s too distracted to notice.

\---

He soon learns that the knots in his stomach, the dread, and increased anxiety he felt upon realizing he loves Nini isn’t a fraction of how miserable a person can truly feel, because what he feels now without her is infinitely worse.

He feels sick, his bones weighed down by exhaustion and aching sadness and straight up missing Nini, and when he lets himself cry about it alone in his room, it’s worse. He curls up in a trembling ball, wiping away tears and snot in equal measure, and if he had his wits about him, he’d be embarrassed despite no one even seeing him like this, but he’s too sad to feel anything close to shame which definitely makes his behavior even more pathetic.

At first, avoidance is the easiest path to venture down. He brushes off everyone’s attempts to talk to him about her, ignoring the pitying looks from his dad and increasing concern from Big Red, and he decides to sidestep any potential Nini landmines at school. Avoiding the theatre room? Easy. The library, particularly on Tuesday afternoons when she tutors freshmen in world geography? Totally doable. Her locker? Already out of his way anyway.

But then he sees her in the cafeteria with a few other kids from the drama department, using the heel of her hand to hide her smile at whatever E.J. Caswell is saying, and he can’t avoid staring at her in English class when she’s practically sitting in his line of sight, and it’s not like he can reconstruct the neighborhoods of Salt Lake City to avoid passing her house. The first time that he rides past her house on his skateboard, it feels like he can’t even breathe.

When his parents initially filed for divorce sophomore year, they’d all been court mandated to attend individual sessions with a family counselor, and as he waited for his appointment to start, he can still remember a poster tacked up in the lobby about the five stages of grief, set in block lettering against a black and white stock image of a sad-looking daisy. He’d been told that the stages can be applied to all kinds of loss including breakups. Sure, they’d meant his parents, but looking back, he wishes he’d asked if it was possible to skip the first three stages completely and land straight in depression?

If anyone could manage such a thing, it figures that it’d be him.

\---

It takes him two weeks to get over himself and ask his mom for the recipe. Since the divorce was finalized last year and she moved to Chicago with the boyfriend whose existence Ricky still prefers to ignore, his conversations with his mom are relegated to absolutely necessary occasions: holidays and birthdays.

And by birthdays, he thought that list was exclusive to his mom’s and his own, not Nini’s, but if there was anyone to make an exception for, it’d be her.

“Mom?” he asks when she answers his call. “Can you send me the recipe for those layer bars that you made? Yeah, the one’s that Nini loved.”

He’s not exactly a cook and even less so a baker, and it’s not like he anticipates his dad being much help either given their propensity to order in, but for as long as he can remember, Nini has loved his mom’s seven layer bars, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink kind of dessert packed with chocolate and butterscotch chips, nuts and shredded coconut, all on top of a buttery graham cracker crust.

And for his girlfriend—who has been shrugging him off whenever he asks what she wants for her birthday, who has loved every handmade, handwritten present that she’s ever received, simply because someone made it with her in mind—he can’t think of a better birthday gift than something homemade _and_ nostalgic.

Or at least he thinks so until he’s only one layer in and he has chocolate smeared across his cheek and sweetened condensed milk leaving a sticky residue wherever he goes. It dawns on him that he might be in over his head.

But it’s definitely and completely worth it by the time her birthday rolls around two days later.

He finds her by her locker before first period, sliding his arms around her shoulders to hug her from behind, and she spins around to hug him back as he cheers, “Happy birthday!”

She beams, and he moves to dig out her gift from his backpack. “I got you something.”

She watches him pull out the container, fighting and failing to keep a smile off her face when he takes off the lid of the Tupperware container to present his vaguely misshapen but mostly in-tact seven-layer bars. He holds them out to her to take one.

“Breakfast of champions,” she quips, and she takes a bite, chewing thoughtfully before asking, “Is this your mom’s recipe?” She’s still smiling but she’s also considering him carefully, surely remembering how annoyed Ricky was after she insisted that she call his mom over Christmas. They don’t really fight, but when they get close to it, stubborn and annoyed and insistent on being right, it’s usually about Ricky’s choice to shut his mom out after the divorce.

He rubs the back of his neck, suddenly sheepish by the implication. “Yeah. I asked her for it. You always said they were your favorite, so. . .”

Her smile is so sweet that it almost makes his heart hurt, and she pulls on his hand to urge him close before standing on her tiptoes to meet him halfway and kiss him on the cheek.

“You’re my favorite,” she tells him, and she smells like butterscotch. “You know that, right?”

\---

Ricky hates the homecoming dance. He hates crowds, to begin with, and he hates wearing a tie, and he also hates the sickly pink punch and the flimsy, cheesy decorations—wispy crepe paper streamers, balloons that will be sad and deflated within the hour, the cheap, glinting mirror ball that he knows some freshman was stuck climbing onto a rickety ladder to hang from the ceiling.

But Big Red’s in love with his lab partner and pleads with Ricky to go, settling him with the widest, saddest _I-listen-you-cry-about-Nini-on-a-weekly-basis_ guilt-tripping eyes that he can muster. It’s not like he can say no.

He soon learns that his hatred for all of the aforementioned pales in comparison to seeing Nini dancing with star water polo player slash East High drama department’s quintessential leading man, E.J. Caswell. E.J. spins her, the skirt of her lilac dress twirling as she does, and when she turns back into him, her eyes sparkle with laughter in a way that puts the dumb mirror ball above them to shame.

Ricky thinks he might be sick.

He hasn’t spoken to Nini in weeks, not since the first day of school, and even if he’s discounting the fact that he’s still hopelessly, miserably in love with her—which _is_ a hard thing to discount, at least for Ricky—she was always his best friend first. She’s always been the one that he goes to about the hard stuff: the most heart-wrenching details about his parents’ divorce, the pure, unfiltered sadness he still carries because of his mom leaving like she did.

He never, ever thought he wouldn’t be able to go to Nini, much less that she would leave him behind like she has and definitely not as a result of him being the one to push her away.

Later, he sees Nini and E.J. in line for punch, and he’s not proud of it, but he finds himself practically sprinting across the gym to stand behind them. He doesn’t have a plan exactly, and he has even less of an idea of what to say if anything, but his body carries him through the motions, not so accidentally knocking the punch bowl into E.J.

“Dude, what the hell?” E.J. spits out, and he has his hands up in a helpless surrender, his shirt almost soaked through completely.

“Oh, _my bad_ ,” Ricky says, but he can’t manage to fake a single ounce of sincerity.

E.J. narrows his eyes at him, jaw set, and Ricky assumes that it’s sheer stupidity that’s prohibiting him from feeling intimidated by the senior. Realistically, E.J. could kick his ass.

“Kourtney can help you with that before it stains,” Nini offers up.

E.J. tears his eyes away from Ricky to look at her, taking a beat to understand what she’s telling him. “Right,” he answers flatly, glancing back at Ricky again, his eyes steely blue. “I’ll go find her.”

When E.J. leaves, it’s Nini’s turn to settle him with an unamused look, and under her gaze, genuine remorse spreads through him.

“Nini—”

“Come on,” she interrupts, yanking on his arm to drag him into the hallway and away from others, save a trio of freshmen boys awkwardly loitering together by a trophy case.

She turns on her heel, whipping around to face him, and drops his wrist to cross her arms over her chest. It’s stupid, because she’s pissed, evident by her pursued lips and cold stare, but Ricky can’t help but feel colder by the sudden loss in contact. “Why are you acting like this?”

He swallows and shoves his hands in his pockets, pivoting towards obliviousness. “Like what?”

“Like. . .” She trails off, and she looks away, anywhere except at him, gesturing vaguely with agitated hands, and her frown deepens before she finally snaps, “Like some jealous ex-boyfriend.”

“Well, technically—”

But she doesn’t stop, steamrolling ahead. “You’re the one who wanted to take a pause!”

He shakes his head, because doesn’t she understand? “Yeah, I _wanted_ to, past tense,” he reiterates. “And now I _want to_ —”

She mirrors him, shaking her head, and cuts him off, “No. _No_ , you’re only saying this now because—” She stops and screws her eyes shut, and his mind rolls through what she might be thinking: because I’m here with someone else, because you want to ruin my night, or worst of all, because I’m happy without you.

She doesn’t say any of the above, however, taking a sharp breath before saying, “I have to go.”

She pushes past him before he can say another word, leaving him helpless to watch as she goes.

\---

Nini hosts a Julie Andrews double feature in her living room for all the theatre kids, and by boyfriend association, Ricky, but he zones out pretty quickly when Mary Poppins leads the Banks kids into a sidewalk chalk drawing—did this movie always make so little sense?—and jumps at the chance to help make more popcorn, following Nini into the kitchen.

She’s just placed the bag in the microwave and set the cook time when she turns, and just because he feels like it and just because he can, Ricky catches her lips in a kiss before she can say anything, and within a moment, she kisses him back, wrapping her arms around his neck to keep him close.

When he pulls away, she blinks up with owlish eyes, lips parted. “Hi?”

“Hey,” he says brightly, and he leans down again, only to feel Nini’s palms flat on his chest, keeping his mouth from reaching hers.

“We have people waiting for popcorn,” she says, her tone lightly scolding as she points to the microwave.

“But we have—” He checks the microwave timer. “Two minutes and thirteen seconds to spare.”

Nini rolls her eyes, but this time when he leans into her, she presses up to kiss him back. Her mouth opens easily beneath his, and even after months of dating, the sweetness of kissing Nini always leaves him giddy and eager and wanting infinitely more. He hums against her lips happily, slipping his hands under her sweatshirt, his fingers ghosting over her back, and her hands are in his hair, threading through the curls at the nape of his neck, and he thinks that he can stay like this for hours, decades, maybe even forever.

The microwave dings loudly, causing the two to break apart at the sound though Nini keeps her hands on his shoulders. She looks to the microwave then back up at Ricky, her lips swollen and eyes dazed.

“Two more minutes,” she says.

He grins, all too pleased with himself. “What happened to giving the people what they want?”

She bites on her bottom lip before conceding slowly, “They can wait another two minutes.” But before he can kiss her again, she catches his smirk and flicks him in the forehead. “Don’t be annoying when you get your way.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he tells her with a mock two-finger salute before kissing her once more.

\---

The Monday following homecoming, he sees E.J. coming in his direction, meandering down the hallway with another guy from the water polo team, the duo carrying themselves in the high school halls in the self-assured, unbothered way only popular people can. Before E.J. can see him, Ricky promptly does an about face, heading in the opposite direction of his next class.

But it’s too late.

“Hey,” a voice calls out from behind him. “Bowen!”

Ricky freezes and digs his toe into the ground before turning back around, teeth clenched, to see E.J. walking towards him.

“We should probably talk,” E.J. says flatly.

“Nope, don’t think we need to,” Ricky mumbles, earning a raised eyebrow from E.J., and he sighs, shoulders sagging. He knows that getting iced out by Nini is categorically worse than having to deal with E.J. Caswell, but a small spiteful part of himself can’t help but hate this more.

“Look, Nini already yelled at me at homecoming, and I get it—you’re with her, I’m not, so I’m just. . .” He shakes his head. “I’m going to leave you guys alone, okay?”

E.J. blinks at him dumbly. “What are you talking about?”

Ricky falters at the look of genuine confusion on his face. He knows that E.J. winds up getting the lead roles in most of the school musicals, but he’s pretty sure it’s because there’s not enough guys to go around in the theatre because frankly, E.J. is _not_ that good of an actor.

“Nini and I are friends,” E.J. continues. “That’s it.”

Ricky has to run through his words three times before they make any kind of sense in his mind, and even then, all he manages to say is: “Oh.”

E.J. rolls his eyes. “Yeah. _Oh._ So, word of advice?” Ricky can’t think of anything he’d like less from E.J., but the other boy continues, “You’d do a lot better with her if you didn’t act like such an asshole.”

Ricky spits out an indignant “ _hey!_ ”

But E.J. ignores him. “She already talks about you all the time. Stop screwing it up by being you.”

And before Ricky can push him to elaborate more on what _that_ is supposed to mean, E.J. turns and heads back in the direction in which he came.

\---

Junior year turns out to be hard. As Nini said herself, it orbits around the nebulous concept of everyone’s Future with a deserved capital F for how ominously the adults in his life speak to it. Colleges, entrance exams, AP classes, resume-building—it’s all a hard-left turn from the babying they were put through up until now.

Dating Nini turns out to be easy, though, maybe the easiest thing in his life.

They study together, pouring over textbooks and notebooks, until Ricky inevitably gets distracted and even more inevitably pulls Nini away from her work as well. She leans against him as he strums mindless chord combinations on his guitar until he grows bored once more, pushing his head into her lap. Through nights like these, he realizes pretty quickly that she likes his hands, tracing the lines across his palms and drawing tiny stars on his scarred, calloused-from-guitar fingers with her colorful gel pens.

They spend the weekends traversing across the greater Salt Lake, flipping through stacks at record stores until Nini finds Carole King’s Tapestry, trying out new diners with Ricky insisting that a diner is only as good as its blueberry pancakes. They drive around for hours listening to one of Nini’s carefully curated playlists until long after the sun has set, and these nights will usually end in a McDonald’s parking lot with Ricky arguing that French fries couldn’t exist without ketchup, horrified as he watches Nini eat a fry plain.

Something has inevitably shifted now that they’re dating. He takes her hand without thinking, swinging their joined hands as they walk in step together, and when she tells him goodnight, she presses a kiss to his cheek, and the way that his heart has always swelled at the sight of her makes new sense.

And yet, she’s still Nini, and he’s still Ricky, and in more ways than not, they’re exactly like they always have been.

\---

It’s a Tuesday afternoon in which he knows that Nini is slated to be in the library quizzing a freshman on world capitals, so he carefully sidesteps the area during study hall, heading for the football stadium instead for fresh air. So, of course, in a sick twist of fate, he spots her in the bleachers, reading in the first row, and of course, she looks up as if she knows he’s coming, her sixth Ricky sense.

The tip of her nose is bright red, and he tries to tell himself that it’s from the early November chill, not a result of her possibly crying, but his question slips out anyway. “Are you okay?”

Noting her place in her book before closing it, she squints at him, and he steps closer. “Yeah. No. Sort of—just stupid stuff,” she finally answers.

They haven’t spoken since homecoming, though E.J.’s words have weighed heavily on his mind. _She already talks about you all the time._ He assumes that’s what compels him to sit beside her on the cold metal bleacher, maintaining a safe distance between them. But it’s something else that E.J. said— _you’d do a lot better with her if you didn’t act like such an asshole_ —that compels him to say, “Try me.”

“Theatre drama. College applications,” she rattles off then pauses, sparing him a glance. She looks up at him through her eyelashes, just for a moment, before averting her gaze. When she sighs, her breath is visible in the air. “Other stuff.”

He swallows thickly and finds himself staring at her profile while she looks pointedly forward. “Well,” he begins. “I distinctly remember there always being theatre drama that resolved itself by the cast party where you all would hug and cry and swear to love one another until the world ends.” He’s teasing but also not—he picked Nini up from Denny’s last year after Beauty and the Beast to see her literally crying into her waffles. “College wise, I can’t exactly help there, but is Columbia still the plan?”

She lifts her shoulders in a half-shrug. “If I can get in.”

“You will.”

She throws him a shrewd look. “You don’t know that.”

“I have a feeling.”

“Ah, well,” she says, her lips turning upwards. “If you have a _feeling_ , it must be true since that’s so rare.” His heart plummets to his feet in the exact moment that she realizes what she said, clamping her mouth shut, and she turns to him with wide, apologetic eyes, her words shaky. “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

Her comment sucks, effectively knocking the air out of him, but he feels newly worse when it dawns on him that since the night in her room, when he singlehandedly ruined more than a decade of friendship in less than a minute flat, he hasn’t actually said those words to her: I’m sorry _._ And here she is, apologizing to him.

He shakes his head at his lap, unable to meet her eye when he says, “I deserve it.” He tugs on the sleeve of his jacket, sighing, and looks back up at Nini, her eyes still wide with worry about what she said as if he doesn’t owe her a billion sorrys in return. He figures there’s no time like the present to start working off his debt. “If it means anything, I’m sorry, too.”

She gives him a sad smile and an even smaller nod, telling him, “I know,” and he knows that he doesn’t deserve an ounce of comfort that she’s offering him.

\---

The summer before their junior year slips away faster than Ricky would like, a blur of afternoons at the skate park with Big Red and movie nights with Nini and day trips to Antelope Island and the old-fashioned drive-in theater outside of Provo, until he finds himself on Nini’s porch one August evening, the pair watching the setting sun paint the sky in oranges and pinks.

“Junior year,” she announces suddenly, her eyes trained straight ahead. School starts in less than a week, and they got their class schedules today along with an information packet on SATs and the upcoming college fair in September. “Scary,” she adds quietly before pulling her bottom lip into her mouth.

Ricky can see the overload of thoughts bombarding her mind by the way worry is etched into her features.

“Isn’t it weird to think that we’re halfway done with high school already?” she asks, turning towards him. “And that we have to start thinking about the future?”

He elbows her gently, teasing, “You say that like you don’t have your future figured out.”

For as long as he can remember, Nini had a carefully outlined plan: graduate from East High, go on to Columbia as a political science major and soak up the reality of finally getting to live in the city that she’s always dreamed of. From there, law school, job in the city, partner by 35, etcetera etcetera.

“Just because I _have_ plans doesn’t mean they’ll become a reality,” she says, elbowing him back. “And how is your plan coming along?” She flashes a smile, a reminder that she’s just joking, but frankly, Ricky doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t know what he wants to do tomorrow, let alone what he sees himself doing by 35, and he feels his mouth turn downward into a frown. Seeming to notice the shift in his expression, Nini’s own smile turns soft. “I’m just kidding.”

He shakes his head. “No, I know. It’s not you.” Which is the truth—despite the way that she’s meticulously set up long-term goals, professional and personal, for herself, she’s never truly needled him into doing the same, unlike his mom’s own heavy handed hints that it would be in his best interest to do so.

Nini peers up at him, and the concern that shines in her eyes causes his heart to stutter in his chest, followed by a sharp pang of anxiety—which is super, super weird, because Nini _never_ makes him anxious. She’s basically one of the few people that does the opposite actually, so he’s not sure why she’s the reason for the jolt to his system now.

He feels her fingers brush against his knee, only marginally closer than she was seconds before, but he finds himself swallowing hard at her touch. “I mean, I have some things figured out for the future,” he says, his voice suddenly sounding paper thin.

“Yeah?”

He can’t look away from Nini, his favorite person in the world, staring at him with an open, earnest expression, her lips parted, and he _knows_ that she’s not—but it looks like she _might be_ —ready and waiting to be kissed, and before he can second guess himself further, before he can really think too deeply about the fact that the only thing that he has figured out for his future is that he wants her there, he closes the gap between them and kisses her.

And luckily, before he has a second to panic about what he’s done—what he’s doing, Nini kisses him back, practically sighing into their kiss, and as he pulls her closer, he feels a new jolt of anticipation, thinking that his future just started looking a lot sweeter.

\---

It’s the second Thanksgiving without his mom, and he sits at the kitchen counter with his dad eating a rotisserie chicken and mashed potatoes from a box.

“Do you ever miss mom?” he asks suddenly, stabbing a green bean with his fork.

His dad looks startled by the heavy-handed question and gapes at him for a moment before managing to say, “Is this because you miss having an actual turkey?”

Ricky shakes his head. It’s not. Well, maybe it is a little.

But he hasn’t talked to Nini since that day on the bleachers, and he’s not sure what he was expecting to come from their conversation but. Maybe he was hoping that it would allow them to talk again. He wants to tell her sorry for so much more, for every stupid thing he’s done starting with the night in her room back in June, but it still doesn’t feel like he’s going to get that chance.

“I don’t know. I guess, if you love someone for that long, how do you just suddenly. . . not?”

His dad gives him a sad smile. “It’s not quite like that. Your mom and I will always care about each other and of course, always care about you.” Ricky resists the urge to roll his eyes, because his mom sure has a funny way of showing that she cares about anyone outside of random Midwest men named Todd. But he knows that’s not the point. “Love isn’t something that you can turn on and off.”

“I wish it was,” Ricky mumbles to his plate. If he could just miraculously stop loving Nini, that would do away with the misery that permeates from him constantly. Or even better, he could have stopped it the moment that he began, pushing down the accompanying fear with it, and he’d never be in the position he’s in now. Still miserable, still terrified, still loving Nini.

Maybe if he didn’t, it’d be easier for him to apologize and work towards cleaning the slate, work towards being her friend once more.

“What is all this about?” his dad asks.

Ricky shrugs, but his dad settles him with a look. It’s not like he hasn’t noticed he’s living with the mopiest teenage boy in the greater Salt Lake.

“I don’t get it—love,” he answers finally. “It’s my own stupid feeling, and I don’t understand any of it. What I’m supposed to do with it, what I’m supposed to say, how to fix it. How to not mess it up in the first place.” Realizing that he’s likely not making much sense as he goes on, he looks up at his dad and shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“You’re seventeen. You aren’t supposed to know everything,” his dad says gently. “So, maybe just focus on what you do know. And go from there.”

He swallows hard and decides to focus on picking at his limp mashed potatoes instead. He knows that his dad is right, and if the last months have proven anything, it’s that he definitely doesn’t know everything; sometimes, it feels like he doesn’t know much of anything, period.

But he does know that, still, after the last months and messing up with her over and over and her maybe never wanting to talk to him again, he loves Nini.

\---

Despite his better judgement, his conversation with his dad is enough to drive him out of the house and to Nini’s, fueled by his renewed desire to talk to her. While he’d like to say that he has what he wants to say to her locked in place, he knows better by now than to have steadfast expectations of how it’s going to go and how she’s going to respond. All he does know for certain is that the need to talk to her and to see her face has settled in his bones like a terrible ache.

Still, when he finds himself on her front porch, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet after ringing the doorbell, he finds nervousness zipping through his body as well, not helped by the cold November night that’s caused goosebumps to appear on the back of his neck.

Nini opens the door half-way, and he feels relief that she doesn’t look annoyed to see him, only deeply confused. “Hey?” she says.

“Hi,” he exhales, the puff of air accompanying his greeting visible in the cold night air.

She pushes the door open further. “What are you doing here?”

He takes a small, shuddering breath and then the words begin to pour out of him, like he just stepped off a cliff, everything following in a dizzy rush. “I’m sorry. I know that you said that you know, but I still don’t think I’ve told you that enough, so I wanted to start there—I’m sorry for being an idiot at homecoming. You were right; I was jealous, and I had no right to be. I’m sorry that I was a dick to E.J. I’m sorry for assuming that we would get back together after the summer, and I’m so, so sorry that I ever said that we should take a pause. Hurting you is the worst thing I think I could ever do, and I did it because I was scared and an idiot, but you know what? That’s not an excuse, and I’m sorry a thousand times over.”

As he speaks, Nini only looks even more confused than before—or at least that’s what he’s hoping the crinkle in her forehead means this time as he presses forward.

“And I totally understand if you tell me to go fuck myself because I’d deserve it, but I have to tell you that I love you. I’m in love with you, and if you want me, you can have me—you can have me for as long as you want, because I’ve already done the not having you, and I hate it. I hate it so much, and I’ll do anything to make it up to you. Anything you want to do, and I’ll do it. I’ll drive you to school every day and never distract you while you’re studying and I’ll make you seven-layer bars every week and I’ll watch musicals—seriously, anything you want.”

Nini’s silent for a long moment, and under the porch lights, her eyes look a little glassy, leaving Ricky with a sinking feeling that she’s going to take him up on his offer and tell him to leave and never come back, because he doesn’t think being met with tears after telling someone you love them is a _positive_ sign.

When she does speak, her voice is soft, almost tender, when she asks, “Would I get to pick the musical?”

“Any musical,” he promises then corrects himself very solemnly, “ _Every_ musical.”

When he confirms that there are unmistakable tears welling up in her eyes, he isn’t sure that he could feel any worse than he has collectively over the last several months, but having to see Nini cry right in front of him may be the cherry on top of the worst sundae in the world. She sniffles quietly, dragging the sleeve of her sweater across her cheek to wipe away the first tears to fall, before she looks back at him with shining eyes and says, “I missed you, too.”

His brain doesn’t manage to process her words immediately, a little slow on the uptake, but then, it does manage to acknowledge the new smile that graces her features, and relief floods his senses as it hits, and all he can do is smile helplessly back. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she confirms with a shaky laugh followed by another sniffle. He then watches as something new crosses her features. She scrunches up her nose, closing her eyes, and tips her head to the right and then the left in careful consideration before she adds, this time somewhat sheepishly, “And you know that I’ve been in love with you for practically my whole life so. . .”

She looks almost annoyed at herself, save the smile that she can’t keep off her face, and he suspects that his own cheeks are going to hurt from the way he’s now smiling so wide. “Yeah?”

“Of course, I have,” she says with an annoyed huff, making a show of shoving him in the shoulder but there’s no force behind it, her fingers lingering and her palm flat on his chest. He grabs onto her opposite elbow, bringing her even closer to stand on the very edge of the step above his, and her faux annoyance fades completely when she loops her arms around his neck.

Sliding his arms around her waist, he grins goofily at her, his voice impossibly eager when he says, “Say it again.”

She rolls her eyes at his request but complies. “Ricky Bowen, I love you so, so—”

But the rest of her declaration is cut off by Ricky pressing his lips against hers, pouring all the adoration he holds for her into the kiss, adamant on making her aware of just how much love he has for her. She kisses him back just as eagerly, opening her mouth to his, pressing herself up into the kiss and his touch, and like this, with his heart drumming in beat to the three words that run through his mind in a loop, kissing Nini feels like the easiest thing in the world.

\---

That night, they share a piece of pumpkin pie on her porch and tell one another every inch of their respective lives in the last five months that the other missed out on—from the impending winter musical to their college applications to Big Red supergluing his hands together in chemistry class. They talk, and they talk, and they talk, never coming up empty-handed when it comes to things that they want to share with the other.

They still have a lot to work through outside of the time that they missed out on together. College looming in the not-so-distant future and how they can fit the other into their plans—and Ricky is making plans; not as grand or solid as Nini’s perhaps but plans, nonetheless. Navigating his own relationship with his mom, a dynamic that he’s acutely aware of now knowing how it influences how he views and fears and even loves love. Working on their love for one another, not as a fleeting feeling but something durable that can last.

As they eat pie side-by-side, Ricky dollops a bit of whipped cream on the tip of her nose, and Nini glares at him—adorably, he says; menacingly, she insists—until she smears pumpkin filling across his cheek in retaliation.

He knows that he’s only seventeen and that they have a lot to figure out, and he knows better than to think that he knows much about anything, but when it comes to Nini, his best friend, his favorite person in the world, loving her feels like the one thing that he knows for certain.


End file.
